Frito Pie is a Texas delicacy, popular at county fairs and considered good tail-gaitin’ eats. This Frito Pie recipe an easy treat to make – a 10 minute prep and then let the delicious texas chili simmer an hour on the stove. Rip open a package of Fritos, pour it on and eat straight out of the bag.
Why This Frito Pie Recipe Is So Good
- An easy to prep and delicious treat!
- The kids will love it!
- A rich and flavorsome chili.
- Great for a BBQ or summer party.
Ingredients For This Frito Pie Recipe
- Fritos
- Ancho, chipotle, pequin chilies
- Cooking oil
- Onion
- Cumin, oregano, cinnamon, cloves
- Ground beef
- Lime juice
- Shredded cheese
- Salt & pepper
How To Make This Frito Pie Recipe with Texas Chili
- In a bowl, soak the ancho and the chipotle chilies in 1 cup of hot water for 10 minutes.
- In a large pot or Dutch oven, heat the cooking oil over medium heat. Add the onions and brown for 3 minutes. Throw in the garlic and cook for another 30 seconds. Place the onions and garlic in the blender.
- Add the soaking chiles with the water into to the blender. Add in the pequin chilies (no need to soak these). Add in cumin, oregano, clove, cinnamon, salt, pepper. Blend until smooth.
- In the same large pot (as step 2) – cook the ground beef, stirring occassionally until lightly browned, about 5 minutes. Add the chili puree and 4 cups of water. Bring to a boil then turn the heat to low and simmer uncovered for 45 minutes, stirring occassionally.
- Taste and adjust seasonings, if needed. (At this step I added an additional teaspoon of kosher salt and more black pepper). Stir in lime juice. Serve over Fritos and top with shredded cheese.
Customize Your Frito Pie
The recipe comes from one of my favorite cookbooks of 2011 – Lisa Fain’s Homesick Texan Cookbook – slightly modified to shave off a few minutes of the hands-on involvement in the recipe.
You can customize this recipe any way you want, including adding a can of Rotel diced tomatoes, a can of beans or using ground turkey, but there’s one thing you don’t want to change: use dried chiles instead of just chili powder.
Lisa’s recipe calls for dried ancho, chipotle and pequin — though I only used ancho and chipotle (couldn’t find pequin). The dried chiles will last forever in your pantry and all you need to do is rehydrate them in water and add them in the blender along with dried oregano, ground cumin, clove and cinnamon. This homemade chili base that has so much more depth and flavor than just ground chili powder.
Plus, you can have fun with some toppings, like sour cream, guac, salsa and top with a sprinkle of green cilantro!
Kids Will Love This Frito Pie Recipe!
The kids loved it – it’s not spicy-hot (top it with chopped jalepeno peppers if you want) and they thought I was the coolest mom letting them eat out of a chip bag.
What To Serve With This Frito Pie Recipe
Serve with a side of Collard Greens, another recipe from Lisa. You could also go for a simple garden side salad or a broccoli salad, and of course a creamy coelslaw never goes amiss!
Top Tips For This Frito Pie Recipe
- Add all the ingredients except the fritos to a slow cooker in the same order and cook on high for 2 hours,
- You can make the chili ahead of time and freeze/refrigerate, then just reheat and add to frito bags.
- Adjust the heat to make it more kid friendly, if you like!
- Serve with a simple side salad or collard greens
Check Out These Other Delicious Tex Mex Recipes
- Pressure Cooker White Bean Chili Frito Pie
- Grilled Fish Tacos with Corn and Pepitas
- Skirt Steak Tacos
- Club Med Salsa Mexicana and Guacamole
Have you tried this Frito Pie recipe? Feel free to leave a star rating and I’d love to hear from you in the comments below!
Frito Pie Recipe with 1 hour Texas Chili
Ingredients
- 6 dried ancho chilies stems and seeds removed
- 2 dried chipotle chilies stems and seeds removed
- 1 tablespoon cooking oil bacon grease or lard
- 1 onion roughly chopped
- 4 garlic cloves chopped
- 4 dried pequin chilies
- 1 tablespoon ground cumin
- 1 teaspoon dried oregano
- 1/2 teaspoon ground clove
- 1/2 teaspoon ground cinnamon
- 2 teaspoons kosher salt (1 teaspoon table salt
- freshly ground black pepper
- 2 pounds ground beef
- 2 tablespoons lime juice
- 2 big bags Fritos or individual snack-sized Fritos at least for each person
- 8 ounces shredded cheese
Instructions
- a bowl, soak the ancho and the chipotle chilies in 1 cup of hot water for 10 minutes.
- In a large pot or Dutch oven, heat the cooking oil over medium heat. Add the onions and brown for 3 minutes. Throw in the garlic and cook for another 30 seconds. Place the onions and garlic in the blender.
- Add the soaking chiles with the water into to the blender. Add in the pequin chilies (no need to soak these). Add in cumin, oregano, clove, cinnamon, salt, pepper. Blend until smooth.
- In the same large pot (as step 2) - cook the ground beef, stirring occassionally until lightly browned, about 5 minutes. Add the chili puree and 4 cups of water. Bring to a boil then turn the heat to low and simmer uncovered for 45 minutes, stirring occassionally.
- Taste and adjust seasonings, if needed. (At this step I added an additional teaspoon of kosher salt and more black pepper). Stir in lime juice. Serve over Fritos and top with shredded cheese.
Did you try this recipe? Please leave a star rating in the recipe card below and leave a review in the comment section! I always appreciate your feedback and I know other readers do, too!
Stay in touch with me in our 
any chili with chips is almost or amazing. with fritos its even better.
This chili is too wet. Four cups plus one with two pounds of meat makes soup. It’s been boiling on my stove for an hour and it’s still soup. Seasonings (cinnamon and cloves) don’t go with this savory dish. Disappointed.
I used to eat this at drive-ins in Tennessee and Mississippi, but instead of a bag it was served in a paper boat and called ‘chili pie’. Yum!
This isn’t a walking taco! This is a fancy South Texas Frito Pie which originated in the 1930s/40s in San Antonio, Texas! 😀
As someone from Texas I’ll tell you the simplest and best way to make it. Regardless of how you cook your chili just heat a ladle full in a pot. Once it gets good and hot add a few handfuls of fritos. Stir it up so all the fritos get coated. Toss in some pepper jack cheese shredded. Stir a few times. Serve with diced raw onions on top and sriracha the Vietnamese rooster sauce. It makes all the difference compared to just pouring chili on top of dry fritos.
Another gem we do down here in San Antonio is put refried pinto beans on our burgers. Do it. But only if they are good beans. No refried beans from a can.
Awesome Texas original..had mine several years ago in Houston. In Ohio, we drive thru Wendy’s with Fritos open and ready; buy the Wendy’s chili for a buck apiece and dump and dip before we leave the parking lot. Wendy’s here are open til 2am so it’s great ” after the nite ” food….beats Taco Hell…..
I really love unpretentious stuff like this!
I have grown up eating Frito Pie – love it. However, I’ve never eaten it out of the bag like this. I do know that people do it thought because my mom grew up in the Southwest and she said at school that is how they served it even – opened bag of Fritos and the chili on top. She said that was a favorite of everyone in her school.
ok, i’m freaking out! and my kids will definitely freak out when they see this one! what kid doesn’t want to eat out of a chip bag?
Just finished making and eating this for dinner….for those out there who can’t find dried chilies DON’T use a whole can of ancho chilies because you will then need more sourcream and cheese than you have chilli to keep your mouth from burning up. 😉 But overall….YUMO!!! Thanks for the recipe.
How much chili should go in a frito bag (there are different sizes!). I read some time ago frito lay changed their bags and the new ones didn’t hold up as the old ones.
How fun to eat these in a bag. Love the recipe and have had a similar dish but never in a bag. Sensational
wow ill be having a great time watching while eating this kind of snack? haha
Oh I have great memories of eating this at our after-football game parties in high school. Congrats on the next cookbook!
Stumbled, Pinned, and bookmarked. This is similar to “Petros”, a dish that gained fame locally during the 1982 World’s Fair in Knoxville. Damn, I’m ready to go downstairs and make this right now.
Hope you are feeling de-stressed now! Keep rockin’ that book out.
I desperately want to dig into this but something tells me I would end up needing a drop cloth. Would it be weird to just cut a hole in a trash bag, stick my head through and eat this on the floor? Yes? I shouldn’t type everything I think! 🙂
i think i saw another version of this. but i still want to try it for good.
oh good. you make my heart away haha.
great my family will surely love this
oh good. you make my heart away haha.
great my family will surely love this 🙂
Oregano? Very good!
Great recipe. I have to try it for a soccer team. They sure would love it!
I think I’m a bit too homesick, since when I saw this post I about cried, haha. Frito pie is delicious, and I even got my Yankee husband to like it and now this is his favorite way to eat em.
if only we had fritos in Japan 🙁 I better experiment with a substitute…
Oh my goodness me!!! I am speechless! This may have been around for a while over there, but over hear this is going to be knocking socks off very soon! 🙂
If only we had a bag of Frito in the pantry — gotta make this in the AM. Totally legit, right? 😀
Walking tacos…..it’s been around for years and on The Pionner Womans and others sites too.
Delicious! 😀
Hey, where’s my avatar?
Very similar to Escoffier’s recipe but without the bag!
I’m sorry that my Chubby Hubby Bars added to your distraction {though I highly recommend making them when you do have time!}, but now you’ve got me craving Frito Pie, so I guess we’re even! ;)Thanks for mentioning my recipe & for sharing yours!
Oh haaaaaayeck YEAH.
Its perfect weather for Frito pie. Too bad I don’t want to leave my house to go get fritos.
I love Walking Tacos! They were often a hot lunch option at school and a popular meal at concession stands! I’m probably going to serve them to my youth group kids soon!
Wow I remember this from H.S. football games in San Antonio – but you’ve gotta put some diced onions on top! So good!
Found this from searching for pepper bellies, when I was in elementary school,1969, We would have a carnival at school every Halloween, and they would make these, they called them pepper bellies back then. Seems so long ago.
Where I grew up these are called Walking Tacos. We would make them while camping or nights spent in the backyard. We would get an assortment box of individual chip bags, try with Doritos sometime! Thanks for reminding me of this fantastic idea!
Me,Myself everysince I was very young !! Used to do with chili,pizza/toppings & or TACO illings the very samething if I had certain somethings to go with it/THEM !!! For instance Using a nice sized bowl I’d rip up some lettuce leaves and/or cruch up some taco shells -OR- doritos at times in a BIG~BOWL and in layers would fill the bowl til I was out of supplies_a.k.a._ topping or fillings!!! It was MOSTLY TACO SALAD TIME for me !!”YUMMY”!!~!!! rRr.,.
That’s awesome freak out and party food right there!
oh lordy do i want that right now